Machine-type communication (MTC) is a machine-to-machine (M2M) communication technology for transmitting data via a wireless network, and can be applied to fields, such as smart grid and intelligent transportation. 3GPP (Third Generation Partnership Project) is studying and standardizing MTC.
A research hotspot of MTC is coverage enhancement (CE). By increasing coverage of MTC, MTC can be applied to more occasions. A technology for increasing the coverage of MTC has been proposed, by which data to be sent is repeatedly sent for a number of times in a time period, thereby improving the reliability for data transmission and thus increasing the coverage of MTC. However, repeatedly transmitting data for a number of times will inevitably lead to extra power consumption and reduce spectrum efficiency. As the number of times for which data is repeatedly sent is increased, this problem will become more severe.